and still i push my barrow all the day
by Tolkien'sInkwell
Summary: Scars never bothered him before, but his world is different now. One-shot


**Word Count: 1702  
Timeline: post-Winter War  
Cautions: Angst. And lots of rambling.  
A/N: This is one of mine that got written in several sessions with literally months in between. That is my excuse and I am sticking to it.**

* * *

Even though he is only a young Shinigami, and although the bodies of Shinigami are uncommonly hardly, Toushiro did not make it to Captaincy and through a war without having a network of scars carved onto his body. Thin, pale lines from training and Hollow fighting; a long, jagged slash given by Shawlong, the Arrancar; most recent, a newly-healed ridge of flesh running down both sides of his shoulder like the seam joining a shirt's sleeve to its body.

Toushiro stopped minding long ago the physical marks of a fighter's life (those battles he can't forget, he'd remember with or without the scars). But lately, when he changes clothes in his quarters he takes care to look at his reflection only straight-on, or not at all. If he turns his head at a particular angle he'll catch a glimpse of a band of uneven, reddened skin above his shoulder blades. It is not a wound given in any battle. Simply the result of a collar of ice pressing down there day after day.

But this one – he hates the sight of it. Wonders darkly whether, if these wounds ever heal (and lately he can't imagine himself without the dull burning of constantly re-torn skin), they will scar too and leave him forever reminded of the days when he couldn't stop himself getting cut by his own bankai.

More than anything else, Toushiro hates the thought that he might be afraid of his own power. Not now, after he's worked so hard and suffered so much for it. Not now, when more than ever he needs to be strong. He has spent too much of his life in fear already, shying away from the cold, empty place inside him, learning only by degrees that the power there can belong to him without controlling him.

After the disaster finishing out the acquisition of his zanpakuto, Toushiro didn't stay very long at the Academy. He was handed over to the Gotei Thirteen as soon as he met the minimum requirement for graduation – possibly the only kindness the Academy ever did him. But that does mean he's missing a whole set of advanced classes in fighting and meditation. Most of what he knows he figured out on his own. He spent countless off-duty hours in Seiretei's archives, sorting through confusing, disjointed material. Not many Shinigami, he learned, have the time to sit down and write out everything they know about the relations between wielder and zanpakuto.

One thing he did find was a picture, a screenshot from Squad Twelve video footage, of a wild-eyed Shinigami with metal spikes all over his body, seemingly fused right into his skin, his mouth open on an agonized yell. "It appears that he pushed himself too far while training," the caption read, "and fused his soul to his zanpakuto's, destroying the bodies and minds of both."

Back then, Toushiro did not understand why a man would run that risk. He still thought there were years and dozens of steps ahead before he'd have to worry about unleashing that kind of destruction on himself.

For some time after he first found his bankai, he thought the flowers that appeared over his head were just decoration. When he learned what they were really for, he was just proud to be able to manage bankai form long enough to warrant a timer at all. Not until he was made Captain did he start to feel irritated and ashamed, started training with the intent to wear himself down to the very last petal. (It wasn't for nothing … he gets three flowers now, when he started with only one.)

Only after Aizen did he learn what it _really_ means to use up even that last petal – that he's used up all the literal, physical capacity of his body to do what he and Hyourinmaru are asking of it. When the last petal disintegrates, the sudden weight of his ice armor drives him to the ground, if he tries to maintain it his head pounds and his vision blurs, and after it vanishes he sees blood on his arms, feels it soaking through the back of his uniform.

It didn't escape his notice before and it hasn't now that, when rendered in black and white, a body covered in metal doesn't look all that different from a body encased in ice.

When he has those dark thoughts, Toushiro's perpetual lack of faith in himself is always balanced by his total faith in Hyourinmaru. _He loves you,_ he tells himself._ He won't let anything happen. _

But when he touches the raw skin on his back, Toushiro can't help but wonder if someday _he'll_ be nothing but a screenshot of a boy with a human face and a dragon's body and eyes shining with empty bloodlust. He'll have his own caption too – what will it say? "He was reckless and stupid and lost control of his own bankai"?

_ After all, how can he protect you if you won't listen to him?_

(Toushiro's faith in Hyourinmaru is balanced by his lack of faith in himself.)

And for all this…it isn't even as though he's getting any stronger. He hasn't been able to call up _Hyoten Hyakkaso_ again at all since the battle. Sometimes he thinks of the single time he did manage to use the attack successfully and wonders what Halibel would say if she knew that it is because of her nearly as much as Momo that he's in this condition now – because, if it's pointless to believe she deserved to keep living, then she deserved at least to be defeated properly. He boasted once that the waters of the clouds themselves were his to command…now, thinking back, it seems a very long time since the skies have listened to him.

He just wants to be _better_. Is that so much to ask?

If he has to hurt himself, scar himself, to do it … well … surely that's nothing he's never done before.

The thought occurs to him, when it isn't drowned out by pounding blood, racing heartbeat, adrenaline making a cacophony of his thoughts (or else shutting them down altogether), that this time is different; that this time he isn't doing it right (_training – living – maybe both_). The sensible part of his mind doesn't get itself heard much lately, but it tells him that he might as well be throwing his body against the walls of his training cave, trying to break them with brute strength. Ineffective…fatal…an entirely pointless way to die.

Toushiro may not get much joy out of living these days, but he's not ready to give up and die. Else he would have just died in the Squad Four hospital, when his life hung by only the thread of his own willpower.

But he held on because he believed in the chance to end his life on something other than spectacular failure.

After all, isn't that the lesson that has been imprinted on him since the Academy – before, even? This notion that all that separates the victor of a battle and the loser is that one of them _wanted_ it just a little more? Strength comes from strength of conviction, and you can always become stronger. This is a lesson that has always applied to Toushiro in particular. He's a prodigy, a creature of potential, not skill, judged not by what he has done but what he might do. In the very beginning, his zanpakuto recognized his potential; he was made Captain for his _potential_. His entire life in the Seiretei is built around the fact (or the hope) that lying dormant in his soul is enough power to command the heavens, to topple gods and destroy monsters.

… But all Toushiro wanted to do was help one wounded friend.

He doesn't really know what he wants anymore, now that the last enemy has been defeated but it hardly feels like victory at all. All he knows is that the compulsion to do _something_ follows him everywhere, and that he doesn't have the potential to do anything after all.

And he knows his fear – the true name of the fear that makes him shiver over the marks across his back; not fear of what else his powers might do to him, but the fear that all his power and all his conviction are (once again) not enough. He is failing now as he did in front of Aizen and Halibel; he is _failing_ and there is nothing he can do to stop it and, at the end, there may or may _not_ be a way to salvage his own life from the wreckage. The inquisitive young Shinigami of the future will stare at his picture on an Archive screen and scoff at the child wonder who shone explosively, unrealistically bright, like a flashy summer firework, and then burned away to nothing.

(At the back of his mind, too, is the unpleasant knowledge that sometimes he almost _wants_ to go out that way, so at least he can say that _I gave everything I had_.)

(Even if he gives it for nothing.)

Meanwhile, the pain of his self-inflicted wounds hounds him like a living, insidious thing. He doesn't recall ever being this hyper-aware of his injuries, even after Aizen cut him down the first time, but then, those were all simple, violent battle wounds; this drawn-out process of constant, low-level pain is a new experience for him. It doesn't prevent him from performing his duties, but he is never free of the phantom sensation of ice slowly grinding down his flesh. It keeps his mind fuzzed, pricks at him when he dares to feel almost calm, and it brings memories with it, ghosts of friends and enemies alike, all demanding that he pay for his failures in blood.

So even though he _knows_ that he isn't doing this right, isn't doing much of anything right right now, he sets out for his cave each day and drags himself home in the evening and tries to forget about his scars-in-the-making, and the ghosts leave him alone for a while.

If his powers can do that for him, then he will count them good enough.


End file.
